Note: it requires unity plugin, but don't worry; it downloads fast, installs fast and you don't have to quit your browser, once the install is finished the site will just load the content without any interaction required.
Also worth noting is that it will scale to fit the browser window and if you right click, you can go Fullscreen.

The Lighting and shadows are all baked/frozen onto the models texture. This model is 50,000 polygon and has 5 1024x textures. I could probably reduce It's size and complexity by about 6x with various optimizations and use of normal maps. And that's exactly what I'll be trying out next.

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And as a side note I've just updated my folder icon generator for Leopard icons, bit late, It's been generating icons in the old fashioned perspective format up till now, now it looks like:

It looked like this before:

It's an apple script app you drop Folders onto and it generates the icons from any images it finds inside and then puts the generating icon onto the folder all in one go. Powered by ImageMagick and the built in SIPS to a degree. I still like, almost prefer the perspective icons, but they do look dated now and they look awful in most places such as in Docks and in Coverflow because of the fake perspective.

Messing in 3D, just took a few quick photos of the room I'm in at multiple exposures, merged them together to make a 32 bit HDR, then had a play at lighting a scene and some glass objects I made using that image. The 6 ceilings lights cast the appropriate 6 varying shadows as they do in the real room, along with fancy soft penumbra? shadows youd expect, renders very fast too thanks to Vrays image based Area Light. Normal global illumination would take AGES, now lighting a scene using an image is easy!

In fact, the scene has no bounced light in it at all. No point with the nature of the scene really.

Before post work

I have a big shiny Chrome ball, photographing that:

Can then be used to light a room by turning it into a spherical panorama:

Clearer look at the multiple shadows it casts and the interesting natural variance they have, more interesting than boring predictable uniform spotlight any day.

Though of course lighting an object with 6 horrid halogen ceiling lights is going to look pretty awful in an artistic sense, It's interesting in a recreation of reality sense.

I've been helping a friend out with a render he needs to get done real quick. He's in the middle of purchasing a real computer so I offered to render it for him with my collection of networked friends/machines. Currently totaling around 70ghz on a good day.

Heres the original scene he handed me, It's pretty rough, most of it supplied by the client and with all sorts of inverted normals and light leaking issues which I fixed for him:

I played for a while with the lighting and render settings to get to render faster and more realistically:

Here the Movie below:

It's still very rough, especially in some places. And H264 Codec conversion seemed to screw up the color balance making it a but yuck and desaturated, oh well.

I'm eagerly anticipating the next iteration of the game 11 years after the first one! It's been long overdue

It's really taken a decade for computers to get to the point where they can recreate the graphics of the original 2D game but in full 3D. So I'm glad they waited till now to do it, and I hope they do it properly!

The original required all but a 90mhz processor and 16mb of ram! And is still updated to this day, and despite first requiring the now ancient Mac OS 7.6 and Windows 95 it still runs today on the latest Intel Macs running os 10.5 (a full 8 OS cycles later)

It's a bit low poly still as it has to work on a full range of computers, the game is'nt meant to be on the bleeding edge, It's not a FPS, it needs to be accessible and run at a high FPS with thousands of units on the screen.

I just noticed how the units and building for Terran have changed in Starcraft 2 as they are working on it still.
On the left are the new units, on the right the old ones, which appear more cartoony and less defined/low poly looking.

Thank god they fixed that, it looked awful before. Looking at it still though some units/buildings in the other races look like they need a rehaul too, hopefully they are still working on that in the same manner... hangon.. yup looks like they are indeed loking at screenshots stuff is changed every screenshot almost:

Starcraft 1 of course went through massive changes as it was being built, starting all the way back in 1996. I've managed to dig up some old alpha screenshots of that below.